Smoking will soon be extinguished in all public housing across the United States, but the Alaska Public Housing Finance Corporation is planning to move quickly in meeting new requirements from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
HUD announced Wednesday that it will require all public housing to be smoke-free by late 2018. AHFC will make its units free by spring 2017, said Cathy Stone, manager of AHFC’s public housing division.
“This has been on our radar, and we are going to the board (of directors) in January,” she said.
The HUD rules ban smoking “inside all indoor areas of public housing … and in all outdoor areas within 25 feet of the housing and administrative office buildings.”
Assuming the board approves the smoke-free plan, AHFC would implement the smoking ban once the weather warms.
“It’s always easier for residents if we implement a rule like this in spring,” Stone said.
Several public housing organizations across the state have already made themselves smoke-free, including the Petersburg Indian Association (which changed its rules in 2008) and the Tlingit and Haida Regional Housing Authority, which became smoke-free in 2010. All will be required to ban smoking under the new HUD rules or risk their federal funding.
AHFC, like HUD, is planning the shift for a variety of reasons including health, a reduced fire risk, lower maintenance costs and better indoor air quality.
“It’s a considerable expense for us to maintain a smoker’s unit and/or turn it,” Stone said. “There’s a lot of remediation that has to occur, especially if someone’s a chain smoker for a long period of time.”
Norton Gregory, a City and Borough of Juneau Assemblyman and a housing manager for Tlingit and Haida, recalls one incident before that agency banned smoking. A housing unit in Haines had been occupied by a regular smoker for 15 years. When that smoker moved out, Tlingit and Haida staff had to literally scrape the ceiling and walls of accumulated tar, he said.
Gregory started working at Tlingit and Haida in 2009, one year before organization made its units nonsmoking. Today, Tlingit and Haida operates about 150 housing units in Juneau and almost 550 across Southeast Alaska.
When the switch happened, Gregory recalls only one angry phone call. Most residents accepted the no-smoking rule as good for their neighbors’ health and good for their own health. And, as Gregory said, “We weren’t saying they couldn’t smoke; we were just saying they couldn’t smoke inside.”
AHFC operates 207 public housing units in Juneau: 75 at Cedar Park on Douglas Island, 25 at Geneva Woods on Douglas, 62 at Mountain View senior housing, and 45 at Riverbend.
Any smoker can tell you that it isn’t easy to quit, and public housing is often a home of last resort for people who don’t have (or can’t afford) alternatives.
While smokers can continue their habit outside, Stone said AHFC doesn’t have plans to immediately evict residents if they continue to smoke indoors.
“We don’t want to kick them out, so we’re going to work with them as much as we possibly can,” she said.
AHFC’s plan is to send “notices to correct,” to residents caught smoking indoors. If a person gets three notices in a six-month period, AHFC will send a “notice to quit” and start the eviction process.
Stone said AHFC has also been in discussions with the American Lung Association and the Alaska Tobacco Quit Line to help residents wean themselves from the nicotine habit.
The Lung Association’s Alaska chapter on Wednesday issued a statement praising HUD’s decision, and the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium also said it supports the move.
“Few tobacco control policies are likely to save more lives than smoke-free housing,” said Edy Rodewald, SEARHC’s Tobacco Program manager, in a prepared statement.
The smoke-free plan was presented to AHFC’s Resident Advisory Board in October, and according to an AHFC summary of that meeting, “RAB members supported the timeline (for implementation) and were enthusiastic about plans to eliminate smoke in AHFC buildings.”
If approved by the AHFC board in January, staff intend to send notices to all residents in February. Residents will be asked for their comments on the plan, and if no significant comments are received by April, existing residents will have their rules or leases amended.
If all goes as planned, the smoke-free program starts May 1.
This story was updated Thursday morning with comments from Norton Gregory.
